Monday, November 26

Nanocoremo: Blues and Inks

After settling on a pencil sketch of the cover, I traced the image on a lightbox with a non-reproduction blue pencil.

This is my first time working on a full image with the blue pencil. I figured that it was worth the risk of having toe lightbox the original again; I'm making so many iterations of the design that one more wouldn't be so bad. But it came out fine. The pencil is waxy and doesn't easily crave to a point. It takes some adjustment.

I altered that image quite a bit. I shortened the neck (also cheating the jumpsuit collar up to make the shoulders higher), thinned out the raised forearm, and reworked the hips. I always make the lower part of the torso too short. It's a dumb mistake. We refer to some figures as "hourglass," and you can build the torso by sketching an hourglass shape. Just make the lower triangle as tall as the upper half. Not that this is a rigid rule; some folks are low- or high-waisted.

Once I was happy with the blue image, I inked it with Micron pens.

if I could find decent inks anymore, I'd work with brushes. I know too that I can always tweak it digitally when I scan the image. That allows me some freedom of ink play.

I made the mouth bigger and fiddled with the shadows around the eyes. Might do more with the hair before I start coloring. But first I'm going to make the background in Photoshop.